it's certainly a space-filling curve problem, but it's not the traveling salesman problem. you aren't just trying to avoid revisiting nodes -- you're trying to maximize the *angle* between edges when you visit the node, to avoid overlap while you're turning the mower. which is at least an interesting wrinkle in the problem.
you certainly can call someone a "fatass". there is no law against it. you can call someone anything you want, but in return someone might call you an "asshole", and they might be right.
is there a line between political correctness and politeness? or do you think we need to get rid of that too?
and fwiw, I agree, smith wasn't exactly forthcoming with the details of the case (he was switching flights, only single seat available, etc) and SW has acquitted themselves pretty well from a PR perspective. i think the man just got a little stung by a humiliating experience and wanted to rant a little.
ask someone else to review your code. explain it to them; if it's hard to explain, maybe it needs work. read other people's code voraciously and critique it (maybe privately). let your ideas about style, techniques, practices become more fluid over time, not more rigid; this is the number one cause of death among programmers. be passionate and don't feel bad if other people don't care as much.
well -- document.write() gets executed when it's called, not just during page load. you can call document.write() as a side-effect of an AJAX request and it will work (though i think you're right -- DOM manipulation is the idiom for dynamic web programming these days).
but really i don't think google should index either. there's a difference between a document and an application. the guy mentions the annoying buzzword of the year, 'Web 2.0', which (i think) is really about how web browsers now give you applications in addition to documents. it's useful to have an index of documents; not so useful to have an index of every state reachable by an application (see e.g. MS Word help).
it would be interesting if at some point crawlers could distinguish between the two.
i too wrote a bunch of math papers using LyX (and later kLyx -- whatever happened to that?) when I was a student, which was, jesus, in the 90's. good to hear it's still in use, it's a great program. i should take a look at it again, i'm sure i'd be shocked at its quality if it's still been in active development for the last 5 years.
there is something to be said for word processing which doesn't create a lot of distraction in messing around with fine-grained layouts, but still produces beautifully rendered documents. you don't see this philosophy much now that every word processor is basically a word[perfect] clone. i'm not saying that fine-grained layout control is bad, but how much time is spent screwing around with fonts, margins, spacing, borders, 'keep with next/previous', etc in a typical word document?
Admittedly, some other classes may be harder, but I doubt many are truly problematic. And before you ask, yes, I have worked on the serialization system of a Java reimplementation (although only a subset), so I do know what I'm talking about.
I wasn't trying to tread into the hostile sort of "you don't know what you're talking about" territory. I brought it up because I've been on more than a few projects where binary incompatibility between different versions of the same class library became a hurdle. I remember one project in particular, with a client running sun 1.2 VM communicating via RMI over a server running microsoft 1.1 VM... (believe me, it wasn't my idea)
I actually wasn't even trying to call into doubt whether binary compatibility was possible (or "hard"); especially since "not hard" doesn't always translate into "not time consuming". the two real points i was trying for (and maybe didn't articulate clearly enough) are:
trying to reimplement the class library while resisting the temptation of using the readily-available original source as a guide, because of issues like this one, is interesting; and
binary compatibility pushes you strongly in the direction of not providing a radically new implementation for anything
Neither of these are a reason not to embark on the project. Who wants to do a radically new implementation of HashMap, anyway; it works well. I just like to, you know, discuss.
it's not really an issue about compatibility between different JVMs, but between different class libraries running on those JVMs.
I guess I'm thinking mostly of serialization as an important part of RMI in java; i imagine you'd want your client program, running on the Harmony VM, to be able to communicate with code in an application server (WebLogic or something) running the jrockit VM with sun SDK classes somewhere else.
in truth, if binary compatibility is not a goal of the project, i suppose you could always use the harmony VM with the Sun SDK class libraries, but then that really limits the usefulness of doing a class library implementation in the first place. there are also parts of the class libraries that work in close conjunction with the VM (java.lang.Reference and subclasses), so it might be a little trickier than just dropping the Sun SDK onto your own VM (I say might; i'm not sure).
Unfortunately, that documentation is not a full specification of the serialized stream format. For example, where is the load factor and resize threshold of the hashmap stored, according to that documentation? that is part of the map's persistent state, it has to be serialized. i think it's important to recognize the difference between javadoc, which is helpful documentation, and specification, which has a criterion of well-definedness not met by the document you site.
When you look at the code for java.util.HashMap, there are several fields that are serialized *before* the documented fields, using a call to ObjectInputStream.defaultReadObject(). That's a slightly magical call, in that it reads several fields automatically. Not to mention, that not every serializable class in the SDK has been as thoroughly documented as HashMap in terms of its stream format.
I bet they can pull off a really nice VM. The existence of multiple VM implementations has yet to produce the kind of community fragmentation that a lot of people have prophesized, is a credit to the strength of sun's spec writing, and has been good for the platform overall (my java apps, both client and server, run without modification on os x...) I wonder about the class libraries, though.
It seems like maintaining binary compatibility between serialized classes (esp. for collections and java.lang classes) is essential, at least if you want to do J2EE stuff in the long run. It will be at least a nuisance to, say, reimplement java.util.HashMap in a binary-compatible way without illegally appropriating Sun's IP (something the project seems pretty conscious of in their charter/FAQ).
It's not impossible, but I think the IP challenge there is the real issue (not to mention the fact that your implementation is going to be constrained to being nearly identical to Sun's, at least in terms of overall strategy, if not line-by-line). If you read Sun's code in one window, and then write the same member variables in the same order in another window, is that copying code or not? And even if you do write something completely different (say, going with the HashMap example), you have to come up with some kind of transformation from your choice of state variables to sun's serialized state variables, which could look pretty nasty.
I also pity the poor bastard that has to write those AWT libraries...
Sorry you misunderstood the post. I think life begins when a unique (or in the case of cloning, new) organism is in it's first stage distinguishable from the parent.
First, thank you for a balanced reply.
I don't think the idea of distinguishable from the parent is as obvious as presented here. Even after the embryo is matured and separated from its parent, it is still dependent on it's mother and father, or society at large, or the wolf that adopts it, or something, for survival. all of us, all things we understand, are attached to the systems that produced them. viewed at a sufficiently large scale, all biological life is a continuous system. the introduction of organisms into that system, and the reabsorption of them, are state changes. I think if we perceive things differently, it is a matter of perception, and not a property of nature in and of itself.
I am not, in fact, a practicing cannibal, and I don't think that any possible behavior whatsoever is acceptable. But the basis of my ethics does not include the belief that it is a priori wrong to end a human life for any reason, which i think yours must to argue as you do.
I think if there is to be a debate on the ethics of cloning (or abortion, as your rhetoric seems grounded in abortion debate), or euthanasia, or even war, then discussing whether some humans have a right to decide the mortal fate of other humans (or materials that may some day become humans) is logically prior to a discussion of when human life begins. You point out that Nazis did horrible things in the name of science -- if some people had not decided that the death of others was acceptable in the face of stopping their atrocities, they might still be committing them.
in fact, life must begin even before conception. those poor eggs... we must act to make menstruation illegal. women should be required to conceive every month during which there isn't already a fetus in active gestation.
your tacit assumption is that we must never consciously do anything to harm something that is alive. the realities of life on earth make this impossible. i hope at least for consistency that you are a pacifist and a vegetarian. actually, you must not eat -- plants are alive too.
unless you mean to imply that something that is human life, even at the most extreme limits of interpretation, has more value than any other life that exists now, or might exist in the future. in which case your argument extends from a priori assumptions that cannot simply be presented as obvious or logical.
to be fair, i agree that the ends do not always justify the means. but i don't think you've shown that the means imply any real harm.
the core issue is not when life begins. it is to what extent human beings are empowered to act to improve the quality of life, even when moving in that direction threatens sacred ideas about ourselves and our identity as special creatures in the universe. there is a long line of people stretching back into history, who would prevent anatomists from dissecting corpses, or denounce mathematicians who study infinity (it was once deemed absolute and therefore a property of god), or bury important ideas about celestial mechanics, or...
i looked at the text copy on EFF, and saw only reference to the sharing of copyrighted material. this does not make posting any content to a P2P network illegal, as the story unfortunately implies.
i also saw reference to forcing P2P vendors to carry disclaimers with their software, but not to jailing people whose computers were complicit in the sharing of illegal material. where is the language in the bill to that effect (it might be there -- but i didn't see it)?
this kind of uninformed writing (in journalism and advertising alike) was despised enough by hackers that they invented an acronym to classify it -- FUD. the posts that are represented here, with talk of "perfect babies" and "playing God" and such foolishness speak of a community that obviously is not armed for rational discussion of a serious issue.
there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
it is true that as we probe deeper into the heart of nature, we progressively become more of a danger to ourselves. but with this loss of innocence, we become closer to finally being masters of our own lives, and to really understanding our place in the working of all things.
"perfect babies" (i also saw this post elsewhere). you know, you perform your own kind of genetic engineering when you pick a mate with whom to breed -- selected for physical and intellectual attributes which you hope to preserve (albeit in a crude, haphazard kind of way) along with your own traits in subsequent generations. to be able to augment that kind of selection with the ability to delete disease causing genes -- that's great.
sure, there will (eventually) be people who blow a considerable amount of money making their children into blonde-haired, blue-eyed (there is nothing wrong with blonde hair and blue eyes) little volleyball players, but really, for every three or for dozen of those children, someone with real vision is going to have a child who is genetically predisposed for intelligence, wit, and compassion. and against even a handful of such children, those "perfect babies" don't stand a chance for survival. And aside from all of that, my guess is that most people will still elect to reproduce the old fashioned way.
Oh yeah... about the article itself. Having the genetic sequence is like having a billion page book that is written at odd patches in french, spanish, german, bengali, english, and swahili; and worse yet, the book actually contains about one million different storylines, the sentences of which are all woven in and around each other. We have no way of understanding or using this information, and the common conception that there is some gene that controls this or that feature of a person is just plain wrong. for a bare handful of traits, this is true; but many genes code in different combinations with many other genes for widely disparate information, the grouping of which often seems lacking in serious rhyme or reason. And the interpretation of all of that kind of information will take more than superfast computers -- it will take decades of cleverly designed experiements and careful research.
so everyone quit whining and stewing, read that copy of "Future Shock" one more time, and work on teaching yourselves and your children to live responsibly in a world where you might have to have questions about yourself answered that you wouldn't even think to ask. We should work on making ourselves worthy of this kind of power, rather than fearing it, because it is inevitable.
i looked at the report, and it does not appear that your assessment is correct. the problem is in pgp5i, being that it does NOT read from/dev/random where it should. it doesn't matter if the entropy is there or not. basically the problem was something like
randomBuf = read(random_fd, &randomBuf, 1)
intending to read one random byte into randomBuf. which it does in evaluating read, but then promptly overwrites that value with the return of the call to read, which is the number of bytes read, which is always 1 (unless you get an error, but how often does that happen?)! so the buffer is always '1', even on linux. damn, if that doesn't suck.
a comment on the issue of open source having more eyes on the code...
it may be nice to have more eyes on the code, but what worries me is testing. it's what even the most experienced coder wouldn't think of that can come up in those really weird deviant test cases, after which you smack your forehead, say "shit!", and fix it. true, we have tons of people using and reviewing the code, but does it really get as rigorously tested as when, in commercial development, people are paid to do nothing other than put it through the wringer? just a thought.
corollation != causation, agreed. however, several long-term case studies in the eighties made a causal link between tv violence in early childhood and aggressive behavior in later life. there was significant corollation between violent television in early life and aggressive behavior in high school, but no significant corollation between aggressive behavior in early life, and watching violent television in high school. this is how you make the jump from corollation to causation, and it has been verified by many. violent video games are a step beyond violent television. convincing studies may have yet to be done, but causation still makes a reasonable hypothesis (though maybe it's wrong, as you point out). here's a more general commentary on the discussion we've seen thus far (not directly on this email): you know, i love to play violent video games. i like to watch violent movies (though i like movies in general). i did a lot of psychedelic drugs in high school. what amazes me is the extent to which people believe that their own experiences in each of these things generalizes to the people at large. "i do acid all the time and i'm fine." "i live in a quakeworld server." it's like hearing people say "my great-great grandmother smoked twelve packs a day for 800 years and still runs on the treadmill everyday before going climbing and...". tell me if this isn't a contradiction: you arrogantly protest (not the writer of this email, who makes a sound point, but many others who have posted before) a study with scientific backing, which makes a plausible generalization based on fact, because it indicates that something you value might be "bad". What's the device for this protest? A strong belief in a generalization based on nothing but personal experience and the experiences of a few friends, some drug culture lore, and no kind of serious consideration. the point's been made by a few posters already: games, media, weapons, do not instill or damage responsibility in children; leaving them alone with these things when they haven't even learned what it means to love the people around them, when their world is still a unidirectional landscape centered on "me", and it's a crap shoot. it's unfortunate, but people who say things like "studies are all bullshit" just don't know what they are talking about.
it's unfortunate that the right of free speech is consistently belittled by people who think it was designed to indulge their inanity. you can speak freely, but that's not the same as requiring people to listen. and, last i checked, slashdot was private enterprise. which means no one has any kind of RIGHT to post here, to participate in discussions on subject matter that some people care about; it is a PRIVILEGE. that means you should treat it responsibly, and post politely, even with strong opinions, and argue your position with facts, not fury. unfortunately, geeks are often hypersensitive people, however intelligent, who are used to not being heard or understood, and therefore don't even try to communicate rationally anymore, even with each other (i know... i went through that phase myself). people think saying something with a stream of expletives makes it stronger. instead, it only looks like you've inherited your ideas from pop culture, and are hoping to make so much noise in expressing them that it obscures the extent to which you haven't considered them. sorry for this offtopic post, but people so routinely abuse the word 'rights' that it becomes infuriating. on the topic of actually deleting messages (which itself is offtopic... ew), i do think that it shouldn't be done. as someone suggested (and wisely), surfing on 1 is the way to go.
where do you get your information? are you a micro$oft board member? a redhat trustee? what do you _really_ know, or do you get your inclinations and ideas from x-files reruns? The simple fact (and one that people seem to be missing) is, that free software development in general is not dependant on trade shows or expos. it began without them, it can continue without them. the greatest thing about free software and the linux community in general is, it's OUTSIDE of corporate competition. in a real sense, not in the sense that some oss developers have thrown their proverbial hats (no pun intended) into the corporate ring. no free software product needs advertisement, massive public endorsement, or any of that. it's free. there will always be space for it to grow, and people who are willing to develop it, because that's what they love. and i must say, red hat has acted rather responsibly, at least thus far. i'm interested to see what the Red Hat Center is all about. and if they really wanted to "hurt" the linux community, in whatever limited way is even possible, they would do it by mucking around with standards and introducing compatibility issues, the way certain other well-known corporate entities have been inclined. the only thing that can really hurt the linux community, is if the core of real developers, honest hackers, is crowded out by the growing population of whacked out zealots who believe that linux has to be on every PC on the earth, or even most of them, to 'succeed'. don't you doodz have some elite bbs to hang out on?
my apologies if this has been brought up before, but i didn't see it in glancing over the messages.
in many source repositories, you have to register something with a name like "defect" any time you want to drop in some new code, or modify existing code that doesn't have anything to do with the addition of a new feature, so it is not uncommon to have a swack of "defects" in your statistics that have nothing whatsoever to do with failures in the code. maybe some slashdotters aren't aware of this because of the way development is done in the community.
at this point, i diverge from the topic slightly, though this is related to this story, and others of its ilk in general.
really, this kind of imprecision and sensationalism is kind of bad for linux. i love it, much like everyone else, but hypersensitive "linux is flawless" rants and malformed "everything from microsoft is shyte" ideas only prevent people from seeing where things could be improved, or where there are good alternatives. As a student, i know a lot of good, talented people who have taken positions at microsoft because it seems like a decision made with a lot of security behind it. i can't say i make my decisions like that, but what i mean to say is that i think it would be ridiculous to assert that microsoft can't do anything right. it just doesn't happen often.
I am not the person to defend Ayn Rand as a philosopher; her ideas were too often simplistic, and I think her understanding of many of her influences (Aristotle comes to mind) a bit mislaid. This is vague, but any more specificity would be off-topic, I think. And as a writer-- well, a those one-hundred-fifty-page objectivist monologues are about as entertaining as lazer wart removal. But this is not to say that all of her ideas are bad. In a lot of ways, her particular type of moral philosophy (not necessarily her epistemology) is apropos here. She would have most likely viewed Bill Gates as a function of a lazy and uneducated consumer body. The loss of a feeling of personal efficacy that emasculates democracy ("my opinion doesn't matter") is the same that has allowed Gates and his ilk to put a strangle hold on the personal computing business ("everyone else is using it, so anything else i might pay for will probably just die and be unsupported in two years"). if everyone truly acted in their own self-interest, you wouldn't see this kind of pheonomenon. only responsible business would survive. of course, the irony here is that we've only gotten lucky this time; we can't count on the government to save our asses every time a threat like this appears, and it will happen again. why can't we count on the judicial system? because it is the standing product of the same kind of apathy and denial of efficacy that produces corporate tyrants like Gates. large-scale functional systems like the courts cannot be automated to control the quality of life at the individual level, because there is no way to encode all of the rationality needed to do this successfully in finite time (this is another large claim i'll have to leave undefended). power has to flow in the other direction. yes, your friends have laid their principles aside and helped create the kind of destructive standard you (and many others) envisioned some time ago. this is not a weakness in the philosophy. this is a weakness in it's would-be adherents.
Slashdot Mirror
it's certainly a space-filling curve problem, but it's not the traveling salesman problem. you aren't just trying to avoid revisiting nodes -- you're trying to maximize the *angle* between edges when you visit the node, to avoid overlap while you're turning the mower. which is at least an interesting wrinkle in the problem.
insightful, really?
you certainly can call someone a "fatass". there is no law against it. you can call someone anything you want, but in return someone might call you an "asshole", and they might be right.
is there a line between political correctness and politeness? or do you think we need to get rid of that too?
and fwiw, I agree, smith wasn't exactly forthcoming with the details of the case (he was switching flights, only single seat available, etc) and SW has acquitted themselves pretty well from a PR perspective. i think the man just got a little stung by a humiliating experience and wanted to rant a little.
ask someone else to review your code. explain it to them; if it's hard to explain, maybe it needs work. read other people's code voraciously and critique it (maybe privately). let your ideas about style, techniques, practices become more fluid over time, not more rigid; this is the number one cause of death among programmers. be passionate and don't feel bad if other people don't care as much.
the article actually says that it's only 2 meters long. there must have been an editorial error converting metric to metric for the posting.
well -- document.write() gets executed when it's called, not just during page load. you can call document.write() as a side-effect of an AJAX request and it will work (though i think you're right -- DOM manipulation is the idiom for dynamic web programming these days).
but really i don't think google should index either. there's a difference between a document and an application. the guy mentions the annoying buzzword of the year, 'Web 2.0', which (i think) is really about how web browsers now give you applications in addition to documents. it's useful to have an index of documents; not so useful to have an index of every state reachable by an application (see e.g. MS Word help).
it would be interesting if at some point crawlers could distinguish between the two.
i too wrote a bunch of math papers using LyX (and later kLyx -- whatever happened to that?) when I was a student, which was, jesus, in the 90's. good to hear it's still in use, it's a great program. i should take a look at it again, i'm sure i'd be shocked at its quality if it's still been in active development for the last 5 years.
there is something to be said for word processing which doesn't create a lot of distraction in messing around with fine-grained layouts, but still produces beautifully rendered documents. you don't see this philosophy much now that every word processor is basically a word[perfect] clone. i'm not saying that fine-grained layout control is bad, but how much time is spent screwing around with fonts, margins, spacing, borders, 'keep with next/previous', etc in a typical word document?
I wasn't trying to tread into the hostile sort of "you don't know what you're talking about" territory. I brought it up because I've been on more than a few projects where binary incompatibility between different versions of the same class library became a hurdle. I remember one project in particular, with a client running sun 1.2 VM communicating via RMI over a server running microsoft 1.1 VM... (believe me, it wasn't my idea)
I actually wasn't even trying to call into doubt whether binary compatibility was possible (or "hard"); especially since "not hard" doesn't always translate into "not time consuming". the two real points i was trying for (and maybe didn't articulate clearly enough) are:
Neither of these are a reason not to embark on the project. Who wants to do a radically new implementation of HashMap, anyway; it works well. I just like to, you know, discuss.
I guess I'm thinking mostly of serialization as an important part of RMI in java; i imagine you'd want your client program, running on the Harmony VM, to be able to communicate with code in an application server (WebLogic or something) running the jrockit VM with sun SDK classes somewhere else.
in truth, if binary compatibility is not a goal of the project, i suppose you could always use the harmony VM with the Sun SDK class libraries, but then that really limits the usefulness of doing a class library implementation in the first place. there are also parts of the class libraries that work in close conjunction with the VM (java.lang.Reference and subclasses), so it might be a little trickier than just dropping the Sun SDK onto your own VM (I say might; i'm not sure).
When you look at the code for java.util.HashMap, there are several fields that are serialized *before* the documented fields, using a call to ObjectInputStream.defaultReadObject(). That's a slightly magical call, in that it reads several fields automatically. Not to mention, that not every serializable class in the SDK has been as thoroughly documented as HashMap in terms of its stream format.
It seems like maintaining binary compatibility between serialized classes (esp. for collections and java.lang classes) is essential, at least if you want to do J2EE stuff in the long run. It will be at least a nuisance to, say, reimplement java.util.HashMap in a binary-compatible way without illegally appropriating Sun's IP (something the project seems pretty conscious of in their charter/FAQ).
It's not impossible, but I think the IP challenge there is the real issue (not to mention the fact that your implementation is going to be constrained to being nearly identical to Sun's, at least in terms of overall strategy, if not line-by-line). If you read Sun's code in one window, and then write the same member variables in the same order in another window, is that copying code or not? And even if you do write something completely different (say, going with the HashMap example), you have to come up with some kind of transformation from your choice of state variables to sun's serialized state variables, which could look pretty nasty.
I also pity the poor bastard that has to write those AWT libraries...
First, thank you for a balanced reply.
I don't think the idea of distinguishable from the parent is as obvious as presented here. Even after the embryo is matured and separated from its parent, it is still dependent on it's mother and father, or society at large, or the wolf that adopts it, or something, for survival. all of us, all things we understand, are attached to the systems that produced them. viewed at a sufficiently large scale, all biological life is a continuous system. the introduction of organisms into that system, and the reabsorption of them, are state changes. I think if we perceive things differently, it is a matter of perception, and not a property of nature in and of itself.
I am not, in fact, a practicing cannibal, and I don't think that any possible behavior whatsoever is acceptable. But the basis of my ethics does not include the belief that it is a priori wrong to end a human life for any reason, which i think yours must to argue as you do.
I think if there is to be a debate on the ethics of cloning (or abortion, as your rhetoric seems grounded in abortion debate), or euthanasia, or even war, then discussing whether some humans have a right to decide the mortal fate of other humans (or materials that may some day become humans) is logically prior to a discussion of when human life begins. You point out that Nazis did horrible things in the name of science -- if some people had not decided that the death of others was acceptable in the face of stopping their atrocities, they might still be committing them.
your tacit assumption is that we must never consciously do anything to harm something that is alive. the realities of life on earth make this impossible. i hope at least for consistency that you are a pacifist and a vegetarian. actually, you must not eat -- plants are alive too.
unless you mean to imply that something that is human life, even at the most extreme limits of interpretation, has more value than any other life that exists now, or might exist in the future. in which case your argument extends from a priori assumptions that cannot simply be presented as obvious or logical.
to be fair, i agree that the ends do not always justify the means. but i don't think you've shown that the means imply any real harm.
the core issue is not when life begins. it is to what extent human beings are empowered to act to improve the quality of life, even when moving in that direction threatens sacred ideas about ourselves and our identity as special creatures in the universe. there is a long line of people stretching back into history, who would prevent anatomists from dissecting corpses, or denounce mathematicians who study infinity (it was once deemed absolute and therefore a property of god), or bury important ideas about celestial mechanics, or...
my dream can become a reality
i looked at the text copy on EFF, and saw only reference to the sharing of copyrighted material. this does not make posting any content to a P2P network illegal, as the story unfortunately implies.
i also saw reference to forcing P2P vendors to carry disclaimers with their software, but not to jailing people whose computers were complicit in the sharing of illegal material. where is the language in the bill to that effect (it might be there -- but i didn't see it)?
who let the Queen of England start posting AC around here?
your sarcasm is appreciated. "shame on all of you" was overblown, it was an emotional reaction. i'll be more polite next time.
is that supposed to be "G-S-Cube" or "G-Scoob",
as in "G-Scube, I wonder where Fred and Daphne went?"
this kind of uninformed writing (in journalism and advertising alike) was despised enough by hackers that they invented an acronym to classify it -- FUD. the posts that are represented here, with talk of "perfect babies" and "playing God" and such foolishness speak of a community that obviously is not armed for rational discussion of a serious issue.
there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
it is true that as we probe deeper into the heart of nature, we progressively become more of a danger to ourselves. but with this loss of innocence, we become closer to finally being masters of our own lives, and to really understanding our place in the working of all things.
"perfect babies" (i also saw this post elsewhere). you know, you perform your own kind of genetic engineering when you pick a mate with whom to breed -- selected for physical and intellectual attributes which you hope to preserve (albeit in a crude, haphazard kind of way) along with your own traits in subsequent generations. to be able to augment that kind of selection with the ability to delete disease causing genes -- that's great.
sure, there will (eventually) be people who blow a considerable amount of money making their children into blonde-haired, blue-eyed (there is nothing wrong with blonde hair and blue eyes) little volleyball players, but really, for every three or for dozen of those children, someone with real vision is going to have a child who is genetically predisposed for intelligence, wit, and compassion. and against even a handful of such children, those "perfect babies" don't stand a chance for survival. And aside from all of that, my guess is that most people will still elect to reproduce the old fashioned way.
Oh yeah... about the article itself. Having the genetic sequence is like having a billion page book that is written at odd patches in french, spanish, german, bengali, english, and swahili; and worse yet, the book actually contains about one million different storylines, the sentences of which are all woven in and around each other. We have no way of understanding or using this information, and the common conception that there is some gene that controls this or that feature of a person is just plain wrong. for a bare handful of traits, this is true; but many genes code in different combinations with many other genes for widely disparate information, the grouping of which often seems lacking in serious rhyme or reason. And the interpretation of all of that kind of information will take more than superfast computers -- it will take decades of cleverly designed experiements and careful research.
so everyone quit whining and stewing, read that copy of "Future Shock" one more time, and work on teaching yourselves and your children to live responsibly in a world where you might have to have questions about yourself answered that you wouldn't even think to ask. We should work on making ourselves worthy of this kind of power, rather than fearing it, because it is inevitable.
i looked at the report, and it does not appear that your assessment is correct. the problem is in pgp5i, being that it does NOT read from /dev/random where it should. it doesn't matter if the entropy is there or not. basically the problem was something like
randomBuf = read(random_fd, &randomBuf, 1)
intending to read one random byte into randomBuf. which it does in evaluating read, but then promptly overwrites that value with the return of the call to read, which is the number of bytes read, which is always 1 (unless you get an error, but how often does that happen?)! so the buffer is always '1', even on linux. damn, if that doesn't suck.
a comment on the issue of open source having more eyes on the code...
it may be nice to have more eyes on the code, but what worries me is testing. it's what even the most experienced coder wouldn't think of that can come up in those really weird deviant test cases, after which you smack your forehead, say "shit!", and fix it. true, we have tons of people using and reviewing the code, but does it really get as rigorously tested as when, in commercial development, people are paid to do nothing other than put it through the wringer? just a thought.corollation != causation, agreed. however, several long-term case studies in the eighties made a causal link between tv violence in early childhood and aggressive behavior in later life. there was significant corollation between violent television in early life and aggressive behavior in high school, but no significant corollation between aggressive behavior in early life, and watching violent television in high school. this is how you make the jump from corollation to causation, and it has been verified by many. violent video games are a step beyond violent television. convincing studies may have yet to be done, but causation still makes a reasonable hypothesis (though maybe it's wrong, as you point out). here's a more general commentary on the discussion we've seen thus far (not directly on this email): you know, i love to play violent video games. i like to watch violent movies (though i like movies in general). i did a lot of psychedelic drugs in high school. what amazes me is the extent to which people believe that their own experiences in each of these things generalizes to the people at large. "i do acid all the time and i'm fine." "i live in a quakeworld server." it's like hearing people say "my great-great grandmother smoked twelve packs a day for 800 years and still runs on the treadmill everyday before going climbing and ...". tell me if this isn't a contradiction: you arrogantly protest (not the writer of this email, who makes a sound point, but many others who have posted before) a study with scientific backing, which makes a plausible generalization based on fact, because it indicates that something you value might be "bad". What's the device for this protest? A strong belief in a generalization based on nothing but personal experience and the experiences of a few friends, some drug culture lore, and no kind of serious consideration. the point's been made by a few posters already: games, media, weapons, do not instill or damage responsibility in children; leaving them alone with these things when they haven't even learned what it means to love the people around them, when their world is still a unidirectional landscape centered on "me", and it's a crap shoot. it's unfortunate, but people who say things like "studies are all bullshit" just don't know what they are talking about.
it's unfortunate that the right of free speech is consistently belittled by people who think it was designed to indulge their inanity. you can speak freely, but that's not the same as requiring people to listen. and, last i checked, slashdot was private enterprise. which means no one has any kind of RIGHT to post here, to participate in discussions on subject matter that some people care about; it is a PRIVILEGE. that means you should treat it responsibly, and post politely, even with strong opinions, and argue your position with facts, not fury. unfortunately, geeks are often hypersensitive people, however intelligent, who are used to not being heard or understood, and therefore don't even try to communicate rationally anymore, even with each other (i know... i went through that phase myself). people think saying something with a stream of expletives makes it stronger. instead, it only looks like you've inherited your ideas from pop culture, and are hoping to make so much noise in expressing them that it obscures the extent to which you haven't considered them. sorry for this offtopic post, but people so routinely abuse the word 'rights' that it becomes infuriating. on the topic of actually deleting messages (which itself is offtopic... ew), i do think that it shouldn't be done. as someone suggested (and wisely), surfing on 1 is the way to go.
where do you get your information? are you a micro$oft board member? a redhat trustee? what do you _really_ know, or do you get your inclinations and ideas from x-files reruns? The simple fact (and one that people seem to be missing) is, that free software development in general is not dependant on trade shows or expos. it began without them, it can continue without them. the greatest thing about free software and the linux community in general is, it's OUTSIDE of corporate competition. in a real sense, not in the sense that some oss developers have thrown their proverbial hats (no pun intended) into the corporate ring. no free software product needs advertisement, massive public endorsement, or any of that. it's free. there will always be space for it to grow, and people who are willing to develop it, because that's what they love. and i must say, red hat has acted rather responsibly, at least thus far. i'm interested to see what the Red Hat Center is all about. and if they really wanted to "hurt" the linux community, in whatever limited way is even possible, they would do it by mucking around with standards and introducing compatibility issues, the way certain other well-known corporate entities have been inclined. the only thing that can really hurt the linux community, is if the core of real developers, honest hackers, is crowded out by the growing population of whacked out zealots who believe that linux has to be on every PC on the earth, or even most of them, to 'succeed'. don't you doodz have some elite bbs to hang out on?
my apologies if this has been brought up before, but i didn't see it in glancing over the messages.
in many source repositories, you have to register something with a name like "defect" any time you want to drop in some new code, or modify existing code that doesn't have anything to do with the addition of a new feature, so it is not uncommon to have a swack of "defects" in your statistics that have nothing whatsoever to do with failures in the code. maybe some slashdotters aren't aware of this because of the way development is done in the community.
at this point, i diverge from the topic slightly, though this is related to this story, and others of its ilk in general.
really, this kind of imprecision and sensationalism is kind of bad for linux. i love it, much like everyone else, but hypersensitive "linux is flawless" rants and malformed "everything from microsoft is shyte" ideas only prevent people from seeing where things could be improved, or where there are good alternatives. As a student, i know a lot of good, talented people who have taken positions at microsoft because it seems like a decision made with a lot of security behind it. i can't say i make my decisions like that, but what i mean to say is that i think it would be ridiculous to assert that microsoft can't do anything right. it just doesn't happen often.
I am not the person to defend Ayn Rand as a philosopher; her ideas were too often simplistic, and I think her understanding of many of her influences (Aristotle comes to mind) a bit mislaid. This is vague, but any more specificity would be off-topic, I think. And as a writer-- well, a those one-hundred-fifty-page objectivist monologues are about as entertaining as lazer wart removal. But this is not to say that all of her ideas are bad. In a lot of ways, her particular type of moral philosophy (not necessarily her epistemology) is apropos here. She would have most likely viewed Bill Gates as a function of a lazy and uneducated consumer body. The loss of a feeling of personal efficacy that emasculates democracy ("my opinion doesn't matter") is the same that has allowed Gates and his ilk to put a strangle hold on the personal computing business ("everyone else is using it, so anything else i might pay for will probably just die and be unsupported in two years"). if everyone truly acted in their own self-interest, you wouldn't see this kind of pheonomenon. only responsible business would survive. of course, the irony here is that we've only gotten lucky this time; we can't count on the government to save our asses every time a threat like this appears, and it will happen again. why can't we count on the judicial system? because it is the standing product of the same kind of apathy and denial of efficacy that produces corporate tyrants like Gates. large-scale functional systems like the courts cannot be automated to control the quality of life at the individual level, because there is no way to encode all of the rationality needed to do this successfully in finite time (this is another large claim i'll have to leave undefended). power has to flow in the other direction. yes, your friends have laid their principles aside and helped create the kind of destructive standard you (and many others) envisioned some time ago. this is not a weakness in the philosophy. this is a weakness in it's would-be adherents.